St. John in Exile

I need to point out a stage performance that thankfully has been archived on DVD. St. John in Exile is an amazing one-man show, with Dean Jones in the lead. It has to be more than twenty years old, but I saw it again a few years ago and it hasn't lost a bit of its luster.

I wish the small film companies who are nobly dedicated to themes meditating on Christ would turn to this production format more frequently. Blow the talent budget on one outstanding, impeccable stage actor, put the rest of the money into set design and staging the production, and shoot it very, very well. I would bet that for about $500,000, give or take, you could develop outstanding, admittedly small, but profitable movies. I prefer that to a lot of the movies I see that stretch the talent budget and end up simply having to pay for at least one or two devastating casting missteps.*

Of course, I'm a sucker for televised one-man shows. But I would have to say that of that somewhat narrow genre, St. John in Exile is the funniest and most moving. I like it better, just on a production and performance level, than Nimoy's Vincent, James Earl Jones' Paul Robeson, Robert Vaughn's FDR and even Hal Holbrook's Mark Twain Tonight (which would be my second-favorite.)

In any case, track down a copy of St. John in Exile one of these days.

*Incidentally, I'd like to see everything take on Felicia Day's The Guild model, too. I think the studios should completely overhaul the pilot system, and break those pilots up into tiny webisodes. I think that would be a far more effective way of measuring audience response than a) either scheduling a pilot in a time slot when people aren't looking for it or b) killing the pilot before ever once testing it on an international audience.

I also would like to see the Guild people do a stage show, film it, and distribute it online (for cash up front. I may be a skinflint, but I'm no slavedriver! Sheesh.)

Holy canolli. I believe I just broke the "one idea per post" rule. With a hammer. And a nuke.